Tim Collard is a retired British diplomat who spent most of his career in China and Germany. He is an active member of the Labour Party.

Bank profits and bonuses bounce back? Sorry, I can’t raise a cheer

So bank profits are back in the billions, and bonuses abound. The lap-dancing industry and the Colombian export trade can breathe again.

Naturally, the vested-interest brigade is trying to convince us that this is a good thing. No it isn’t. Charging exorbitant fees to proper businesses and gambling with other people’s money is not a respectable way to earn a living. And how do they make quite so much money? Given that banks are largely dealing with other people’s money, how is it that quite so much of it seems to stick to their fingers?

We’re asked why, if banks are trading so successfully as to make large profits, the individuals involved shouldn’t get a fair share of the benefit? But when the banker puts up a massive black and loses billions, he doesn’t get his house and Ferrari repossessed. Maybe not quite “heads I win, tails you lose”, but certainly “heads I win, tails we’ll call it a draw”. It is this imbalance of risk that very recently got us all into serious trouble.

Additionally, if anyone even thinks about raising the levels of tax which most of them don’t even pay, we’re threatened with a “brain drain”. Do they mean the brain drain caused by our best and brightest graduates being attracted into the financial services industry when what we need is doctors, teachers, engineers and actual entrepreneurs? No, they just mean bankers being tempted to send house prices sky-high in New York or Dubai rather than London, and to wreck someone else’s economy. Well, make my day.

And please, no more of this tired stuff about “the politics of envy”. That line has underpinned gross greed for thirty years, but it’s now past its sell-by. Who could be envious of cokeheads working 18-hour days? The politics of equity, more like, which is not the same thing as equality. Even the Telegraph’s Jeff Randall (no socialist he) has pointed out that bankers are not living in the same world as the rest of us, and this cannot be a good thing. In more refined circles, I call my views “the politics of the Magnificat”. Yes, putting down the mighty from their seat and sending the rich empty away have the explicit endorsement of the Blessed Virgin Herself. So there.